


The Sergeant, the Vampire and the Five Orange Cats

by Gammarad



Series: Writing Rainbow Works [4]
Category: Monstrous Regiment (Terry Pratchett novel)
Genre: Borogravia, Gen, Military, Quantum, Schrödinger's Cats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 07:57:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20944970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: It's hard to train cats to be soldiers or spies. Cats do what they want. Cats who there's no way to tell without opening the box if they're alive or ghosts, but who can walk right through the box to wherever they want to be? Good luck getting anything out of them at all.Unfortunately, that's exactly what Sergeant Polly Perks has to do, with help from her enlisted soldiers and also, possibly, from her officers, Maladicta andRupertBlouse.The results of the Quantum experiment are, to say the least, not what anyone expected.





	The Sergeant, the Vampire and the Five Orange Cats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alamorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/gifts).

The young recruit had jumped when she saw the flash of movement behind the pillar. When she saw that it was a small orange cat, she relaxed.

She jumped again when the cat flickered, then disappeared in front of her eyes. Blinking rapidly, she tried to remember what she'd eaten that morning. Stale bread and coffee. Could there have been something -- mold in the bread? The coffee had still been hot...

The sums she'd been trying to do had gone clear out of her head. After trying again, she shut her copybook and went to report the -- sighting, or possibly hallucination. Not as an excuse, but because she'd been told to report anything strange. And this was, probably, strange. She hadn't been at the BICC headquarters long enough to be sure.

Borogravia's new Int/Comms Command had only been in operation for a few years. Once the worship of Om had spread and the Abominations were no longer part of the official rules of the military, creating a center for military intelligence involving clacks and codes had become possible. Because of the nature of the work, involving a great deal of writing down of dots and dashes and converting them into messages, or attempting to do so, young recruits like Efra spent a lot of time writing in notebooks rather than marching and sticking metal pointy bits into straw dummies. 

Sergeant Perks was on duty. Efra thought better of her report. She gave a fearful glance and steeled herself to return to computing sums that might be the ones to break their current target code. Colonel Blouse had set a great many sums, and when he was given all the results, he often could -- no one else quite understood how -- transform them into solutions. It was something he called Quantum. 

When you asked him what Quantum was, he would tell you something perfectly sensible, like that it was the smallest possible measurement. Although Private Zeno quietly joked in quarters with Efra about how if Blouse was so sure Quantum was the smallest, what would happen if she simply cut it in half? 

Efra laughed, but she knew some numbers couldn't be divided without breaking. Quantum measurements must be one of those. 

Sergeant Parks always knew when you were afraid, though. Sometimes she'd call you on it. This was one of those times. "Private Moco," the Sergeant said.

"Yes, Sergeant?" Efra turned around yet again. Her head spun a little.

"You had something to report?" How had she known?

"No, Sergeant?" 

"Now, Private." Sergeant Perks had a serious look. One that said, the security of the nation depends on you, Private Moco. Even if it looked like a hallucination.

"There was a cat, Sergeant, in the scriptorium. It -- it disappeared." Efra's voice wobbled.

"Cats do that," Sergeant Perks said. She sounded like she was waiting for the real reason Efra looked like she'd seen a ghost or had sneaked out for a drink while on duty. The expectation wore on Efra. 

"It flickered and then went invisible," Efra elaborated.

"Like a flame," Captain Maladicta said. She wore men's uniform and looked dapperly untidy, as if she'd been awake all night. Since she was a vampire, she probably had been. One time, Efra had overheard Captain Maladicta explaining to one of the other recruits, a fellow vampire, that she wore male uniform because it reformed with her when she recorporated after accidental contact with sunlight.

Efra thought the Captain was probably having that recruit on. Her theory was that the Captain just knew she looked very good in a pair of well cut pants.

"Exactly like a flame, sir," Efra said.

"It's one of Blouse's new pets," Maladicta said offhandedly. "They do that because they're Quantum."

"They can't be, sir!" Efra exclaimed, not able to stop herself. "I've seen much smaller cats, sir!"

"They're not Quantum because they're the smallest cats possible," Maladicta said, sounding a bit confused herself. "They're Quantum because they don't know whether they're alive or ghosts."

Efra blinked a few times. This was the sort of thing the Colonel often would say, of course, but cats? "Isn't Colonel Blouse a man, sir?"

"I believe he is," Sergeant Perks said, though she sounded less sure than Efra would have expected. "But what does that have to do with the ... with anything?"

"Men aren't allowed to own cats, are they?" 

Sergeant Perks looked at Captain Maladicta. "I wouldn't mention that to him, Private," she said finally. "Dismissed. Return to your post."

Efra returned to the scriptorium and to her sums. It was another hour and nearly time for mess when she saw another flash of orange out of the corner of her eye.

This time there were two of them. They circled the table, two small orange cats, their steps oddly in unison, ignoring each other and intent on ... she wasn't sure what. Some small creature of the sort cats hunt, probably. When they met on the far side of the table, they walked into each other and -- one of them vanished entirely, or they merged somehow into a single creature, it was not clear. The one remaining orange cat continued its prowl and disappeared in a much more normal feline way by stepping behind a pillar and not coming out from behind it again. 

Efra refrained from going over to the pillar and looking behind it for a cat. That would be pointless. Whether or not it was there would tell her nothing. 

\--

Several weeks earlier:

"Vampires can communicate with cats, can't they?" Colonel Blouse tapped his pencil against the desk. Papers shifted in the pile that leaned against the mug of tea his latest 'batman' from among the recruits had brought. 

Maladicta frowned. "Possibly. I don't think I've tried."

"Your lucky day, then! Night! Fortunate." Blouse pushed the cardboard box over toward the vampire. 

She peered inside, where five orange kittens were curled up, asleep. "Ohhh," Captain Maladicta said, not meaning to say anything at all. "Kittens!" What had come over her? What power did these tiny furry things have? 

"For the project I'm doing, it's absolutely necessary that you establish a psychic bond with these animals. Sergeant Perks will be training them physically."

One kitten woke and looked up, stretching its paws and back, yawning and showing sharp teeth. Maladicta scooped it up in one hand and tucked it against her chest, where it purred contentedly. "Colonel, I'm not certain cats can be trained physically."

"The Sergeant will have them behaving like dogs in no time. I have full confidence in you both." Blouse made some notations on the top sheet of paper, then flipped it over to write on the next one. The paper slid off the pile after being flipped and dropped into the box with the kittens. Two of them woke up and had shredded the paper beyond rescue before the Colonel had even noticed. 

Maladicta refrained from pointing out the loss to him. He might not need that page. If he did, there was nothing to be done about it now.

\--

Two days after Efra had seen the orange cats in the scriptorium, the current set of arithmeters, as the recruits who did sums were called, were summoned to assembly to listen to their commanding officer give a speech to raise their morale. 

It mostly put them to sleep. It was so abtruse and filled with advanced sums that the recruits, even those who enjoyed that sort of thing, because of the long hours and the oddly soothing voice of Colonel Blouse, drifted in and out of consciousness. 

They all woke up when their corporals set the metal boxes down on the stage. "These," Blouse was saying, "are the individual isolation containers of which I speak. Each one may or may not contain a living feline, one of a collation of identical or near identical creatures we injected into the environments separately and simultaneously with a random determination of continued life or transition into an undead state..." 

Efra lost track again with the sudden realization that this was where the cats must come from. She leapt to her feet. 

"Private Moco, sit down," Sergeant Perks ordered.

"Are they orange, sir?" Efra asked as she hurried to sit back down. She hadn't even realized she'd stood until the Sergeant mentioned it. 

"The color of the feline should have no bearing on the experimental results, but -- yes, Private, they are all orange in fur shade. Or red, perhaps, is the technical term that breeders might prefer..."

\--

Polly had attempted to train the cats, as requested. She had felt a sense of ownership of them, as if they were just another sort of recruit she ought to teach the ropes to. But the kittens had not seemed interested in being in the military. 

Which was sensible of them, of course, but not something a Sergeant ought to allow. She'd tried being helpful, she'd tried being strict, but the techniques that worked so well with humans (and adequately with trolls, vampires, werewolves, and other individual sorts of men and women who had enlisted since she'd become a Sergeant) had very little effect on cats.

One thing did work on both cats and other recruits: food. The cats paid attention to what got them fed. And one thing worked on cats (and also, she found, werewolves and Igors) but not on humans (or trolls or vampires): quick sudden movements, especially of something on a stick that wiggled or spun. The cats would head in its direction and pounce. (So might the werewolves or Igors; Polly learned to be careful.)

\-- 

Three days before the assembly: 

Colonel Blouse faced the two longest serving members of his division, who had been working on his latest project for him. This project was going to finally get him back into action, albeit second hand. These cats, once they had become Quantum, would be able to get into any place, and back out again. Once they had been fully trained as soldiers by his top sergeant and could successfully communicate telepathically with his vampire second-in-command, they would make the ultimate spies.

"What is this cat thinking!" Blouse demanded to Maladicta, pointing at the closest of the orange cats, the one sitting on his desk in a sphinx-like pose. 

The vampire regarded the half-grown cat with narrow eyes. "She would like a sardine."

"Excellent! And Sergeant, line the cats up for inspection." 

Sergeant Perks pulled a fish-shaped wooden carving out of her pocket. It trailed a long string. She held it by the string and dangled the fish. All five cats stalked toward the toy. By waving it in front of them, she got them standing in a ragged row.

"Not too bad, for such young recruits. I believe they are ready."

"Ready, sir?" Polly asked. She glanced at Maladicta, her forehead wrinkling. "Well..."

"Absolutely. Dismissed, Sergeant."

\--

A week after seeing the cats for the first time, Efra saw them again, but not in the scriptorium. When their minds were no longer capable of sums, the recruits were kept busy reading the newspapers and proclamations from other nations. Ankh-Morpork's newspaper was always the one Efra found most interesting, and she was not alone in this opinion. The recruits scuffled over the Ankh-Morpork Times, though always carefully, so they would not tear it. 

Efra had been fortunate enough to win the scuffle that afternoon, and so she was the first to see the picture taken at the state visit which had ended in an attempted assassination. She gasped, not because it was the infamous Heinrich who had almost lost his life, but because there, in the picture, were five... no, four and a half cats. One cat was clearly only half-present.

The picture did not show color, but Efra was sure all of the cats shown were orange.

\--

"Where are the cats?" Colonel Blouse asked plaintively.

"Wherever they want to be," Maladicta said. "You set them free of space and time..."

"But they were soldiers! They took the shillings!" Blouse did not seem to understand cats at all. 

Not that Maladicta felt she understood them any better. But she did feel drawn to them. Those sharp, pointed teeth and claws... that soft fur.. Those enormous eyes. She gulped her coffee and stood to get herself more.

"Sergeant Perks could train cats into dogs, I know I heard someone say that before I began the project," Blouse said sadly. 

"I think that was what was called a figure of speech," Maladicta told him. 

\--

When she was doing sums, Efra began to notice that sometimes, a cat perched on her desk in her peripheral vision. If she looked directly at the cat, it was not there; but if she stared at her paper and worked the sum, the cat would begin to purr, and she would see its tail slowly move from side to side as she worked. 

They did not watch every sum, only certain ones. After the second day this happened, Efra decided to try an experiment. She went to start each sum, but only actually finished doing the ones the cat came to watch. She got through a week's worth of sums that way in a couple of hours. Then she went to deliver the results to Colonel Blouse.

She brought him tea and set it in front of him, then showed him her pages of sums. 

"You haven't done these in order, Private Moco," he said sternly. 

"Could you check, sir? Please? I think the ones I did were the ones that needed most to be done." She looked at him like a cat would, if it wanted a sardine. 

But she wanted him to check her work, so he did. "Yes, this one... and this... even without those others, I see... Private Moco!" he said when he'd reached the next to last sum she'd completed. "How ever did you do it?"

"Sums, sir? Like I was told, sir." 

"How did you choose the ones needed to resolve the latest intercepted coded message about the attempt against Prince Heinrich's life?"

"Oh, was that what it was, sir? I knew the cats were concerned because of the newspaper..."

Colonel Blouse frowned, then rubbed his nonexistent chin. "Cats? Newspaper? Are you well, Private?"

She explained what she'd seen. His expression shifted from confusion to thoughtfulness, and then he shook his head slowly. "Astonishing." 

\--

A month later, the recruits were all well trained to watch for the cats. They were told, should they see one, to focus their attention on whatever they had been doing at the precise moment the cat arrived. They were also to report any sighting of cats in any papers or dispatches or photographed pictures they saw. 

Polly had not seen the cats since they had gone into the boxes. She wondered if they were purposely avoiding her. All the recruits saw them, Maladicta claimed she had as well, and Blouse said such theoretical things when she tried to ask that she tuned him out entirely. 

But it wasn't an orange cat she saw when she finally spotted one. Instead, it was a big black cat with torn ears and grizzled whiskers. "Hello, old fellow," Polly said to him. He reminded her of one of the cats who'd kept free of rodents the kitchens of the Duchess -- the inn where she'd grown up, that was, not the former ruler of her country. 

Maladicta walked in when Polly was giving the black cat an affectionate scratch behind the ears, and his purr was louder than Polly's snores of a night, not that she had any idea she snored. 

"I've been giving it some thought," Maladicta said. 

"Giving what some thought?" Polly asked.

"Cats," the vampire said.

"Oh, we all have," Polly replied. 

"Have you considered having one as a pet? Having it live with us? It might be nice."

"A pet?" Polly had not, in fact, ever considered it. She certainly didn't feel inclined to consider it after the experience she'd had trying to train the five orange kitten recruits. They'd been the most difficult of her life, and the first group she thought of as a failure. Cats were not meant to be in the military, she believed.

Maladicta stroked the black cat, who rolled over, revealing an orange patch and a definite lack of... socks. The vampire petted the cat's stomach and smiled the least vampire-like smile Polly had ever seen on her face.

Cats were not meant to be soldiers, Polly's thoughts repeated. Then again, that's what everyone in her country used to believe about women. The sergeant felt herself relenting. "This one seems like a good 'un for us, then," she said. The black cat looked tough and ready for anything. They might as well give her a chance.


End file.
